Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness Essay

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Breaking on through to the Other Side and Passing Judgment in Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now Redux: A River Journey to Hell and Back

The river journeys in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Copolla’s Apocalypse Now Redux are journeys into Hell—journeys that provide revelations on the horror of the modern world. Marlowe and Willard represent two different takeaways from these journeys, however. Marlowe’s journey is up the Congo; Willard’s is up a fictional river into Cambodia. Both are looking for Kurtz, and for both Conrad and Coppola the jungle rivers serve as opportunities to reflect on the madness at the heart of modernity as it dares to dance with untamed wilderness without moral protection. Even Dante had the help of Virgil as the poet descended into Hell. In the river journeys in these two works, there is no moral guide, no moral protection, no moral mooring. Marlowe himself becomes the reluctant voice of morality when he lauds Kurtz for identifying the “horror”—a thing the reader suspects Marlowe would like very much to do himself but cannot because he has adopted a distant and somewhat aloof disposition towards the “droll” comedy that he calls life (Conrad, 2009, p. 65). For Willard, his participation in the horror—but mainly his hacking to death of Kurtz—is what suddenly prompts his awakening. He spends the entire film asleep, as though like a Manchurian candidate obeying the signals given him from on high. By the end of the film, he throws down his murder weapon and departs the jungle with the musings of Kurtz under his arm, indicating that he will study the moral teachings of the man who identified the “horror.” Willard goes from somnolent stooge of the state to wakeful student of the deceased. Marlowe goes from aloof, nonchalant, sailor-for-hire, to messenger of the other side—of the reality that there exists another side—of the need for an acknowledgement that what the modern world is missing is moral judgment. Unfortunately, it takes Conrad and Coppola a trip into Hell up rivers into the wild jungle to finally break on through to the other side.

In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness there is the “bond of the sea” that establishes the familiarity, fondness, respect and appreciation that Marlowe has for his pilot-like captain, noted at the beginning of the novella as the forward-looking Marlowe begins his backward-looking account (Conrad, 2009, p. 1). In Coppola’s Apocalypse Now Redux, there is an altogether different bond that opens the film: it is the bond of blood, the bond of war—a bond in which a pound of flesh is to be extracted by the horror personified deep in the territory of the Viet Cong as Willard sails up river to find his target.

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There is no appreciation, fondness or familiarity among Willard and his crew—only a sense of foreboding and fear; a feeling of confusion as everything—every encounter—seems a foreshadowing of the stark-raving madness they will encounter once they finally reach Kurtz’s camp, where Kurtz’s mad disciple, the photographer, serves as a kind of anti-John the Baptist, denouncing Chef’s judgment of Kurtz’s mental state with a fawning tribute to the Colonel’s esoteric methods: “If you could have heard the man just two days ago, if you could’ve heard him then. God. You were gonna call him crazy?” (Coppola, 2001). What makes the photographer’s remark so meaningful is that it gets to the utter hypocrisy of Willard and his mission: he and his crew are no more or less sane than the man Willard has been sent to kill. Kurtz, in fact, serves as a kind of double for Willard, who has already displayed his own cold-bloodedness in the execution of the Vietnamese peasant woman on the sampan in order to get on with the mission following the harrowing “blow up” of his armed crew over a perceived threat that is actually a puppy. The irony there is thick—and it too foreshadows the irony of the end of the film—i.e., that Kurtz has broken through to the other side, has seen the horror—and instead of being lauded for defining it, as happens in Conrad’s book when Marlowe sings his praise of Kurtz, Coppola’s Kurtz is executed for his pronouncement.

Earlier on the river, Willard’s cold execution of the Vietnamese woman gets a “fuck you” and a “fuck them” from Chef, who, in spite of the momentary insanity that grips him….....

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